From my parking garage at the end of last week.
March 10th, 1999

Some Times You're Hot
Well, I spent time with my PhotoShop class on the Internet today, retaking a lesson on using the brush and eraser with their respective history palates. If you don't use PhotoShop, the bottom line is I've been using PhotoShop for about a year now and don't know diddley about it. Don't even know the very basics, but I will. I will.

I worked today on a set of pages for our section's internal company site and realized how much information Face in the window,
        North Beach last Sunday.we keep that must be updated on a regular basis. We're the desktop technology R & D arm of the company so we're always looking at the new model desktop or laptop or palmtop or white board software or voice recognition software or browser or add your own weird just discovered by a senior executive who read about it in the newspaper this morning device. So our page changes. A lot.

The design of a web site like ours is simple and direct. The people who use it want to drill down to find some piece of information as quickly and easily as they can. The page must fit on a 640 x 480 screen, it must be readable by Netscape 3.x or 4.x and I.E. 3.x or 4.x and it must not take time to load. Everything's pretty fast in a headquarters style building like ours with T-1 lines all over the place, but we have offices in places like Bangladesh and Dutch Harbor and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Afghanistan and some places on mainland China that don't even exist yet who are lucky to get any data at all through tin cans tied together with string (so we keep the pages small).

Today it was get the stuff down on the page and the day went fast.

The clown face turned out well. I often shoot photographs of mannequins and masks and whatever else strikes my fancy through store windows and bar windows and restaurant windows (no bathroom windows yet.) because I like the distorted light. Sometimes they're obvious like this one, but sometimes they're just small hard to see pieces hidden in a corner that catch the eye.

Not much of a life to describe here, is there guys? It's working for me, but I wonder how it looks and sounds to folks on the outside. Is this even readable or is it just the piffle and poof of a reality gone stale? Could be, could be not. Some times your cold, some times you're hot.


 
The banner photograph was taken last week from the third floor of my parking garage on my way to my car. It was shot using a fixed focal length 60mm lens. The last series of these photographs were shot with a 35 - 70mm zoom and I'd like to see if the sharpness is any better. Not the best sort of subject to judge that, but these aren't the only photos I'm using to compare. The clown was shot through a store window near the City Lights Bookstore. Nice.

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